BI Style Sheets

Style Guidelines for BI Materials

Essays, Case Studies, Personal Reflections, and Peacebuilder Profiles

  • Length: Varies from 750 words - 3000 words. Sometimes we have allowed articles to go up to 4000 words, but we discourage that. Users tell us over and over again that shorter is better!
  • File Format: Submit your document in MS Word.
  • Document Formatting: Simple!!!
    • Bold, Italics, and Underlining is okay.
    • Numbered lists and Bulletted lists are okay.
    • First, Second, and Third Level headings are good — we like headings!
  • Language - English. Beyond that....
    • Jargon should be avoided if at all possible (people from many different backgrounds read these) and when it is absolutely necessary, all jargon should be explained.
    • All acronyms should be spelled out the first time.
    • Language should be accessible to people who are not native English speakers — keep it relatively simple.
    • Keep sentences structure relatively simple, sentences and paragraphs relatively short.
  • Tables- Use simple san serif fonts in tables — such as arial. Make sure the table is readable at 770 pixels or less. (If the table looks readable on your screen in a space that is no wider than the text part of a BI essay in a browser zoomed to 100%, then you are fine.)
  • Graphics - You can use any graphic that can be rendered on the screen, as long as it is legible at a width of 770 pixels or less. (See above for guidance about how to tell.)
  • Links - put in with word.
  • Citations - Please use the Chicago style, but with endnotes instead of footnotes or in-text paranthetical citations.  (This coverts easily into html; the others take more work.) Information about what this entails can be found here.
  • Bibliography - Also use Chicago style. (See above)
  • Examples: Look at some of ourcurrent essays and case studies for examples of formatting and language; citations and biblios have been converted to html format, but stick with zotero and we will do the html-ing.

Book Summaries


Before you start: Check to see if we have it (or it is available elsewhere online) already.

  • If you want to write a summary for BI, please check first to see if we already have one by entering the title in our search field. If that doesn't yield an existing book summary, try searching again for the author's last name. If that doesn't yield a book summary either, we probably don't have one.
  • But before you do all the work to write a new one, please also search the web and see if you can find someone else who has written a good summary of the book. If you can, we'd appreciate it if you would send us a link to that, so we can add it to our system.
  • If there isn't one already available, we will welcome yours (although they are peer reviewed — they do not automatically get posted without review.)


Length: 1000 - 3000 words.
File Format: MS Word (prefered), Open Office (Okay)
Content: Give an overview of the book at the beginning. Then write a paragraph or two on each chapter, or each key idea. (The examples below show one book summary written chapter-by-chapter, and two other ones that are organized by key ideas.)

  • You can, if you wish assess the utility and strengths/weaknesses of the book at the end. This turns the summary into more of a review, which is only appropriate IF you have the background to compare this book to other similar books, and to assess its utility to different audiences. If you do not have sufficient background to do this, just stick with the description of the chapters — that is fine — and far preferable if you have not read a number of books with which you can compare this one.

Document Formatting and Language: Simple! (See above for details — the rules for Book Summaries are the same as those for Essays and Case Studies.
Tables and Graphics--try to avoid their use; if really necessary, see format guidelines above.
Citations and Bibliography - Presumably the only item to be cited is the item being summarized. Put the full citation in the title as follows: Summary of Getting to Yes, Second Edition. Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton. New York: Penguin 1991.
Quotes: Try to avoid extensive quotes from the book. You can quote occasionally (and double indented quotes is an acceptable format), but don't make the summary just a string of quotes.

Examples: Please look at a few examples before you start: You will note that most of the books in our list are pretty old — we haven't had sufficient funding to do book summaries for quite some time — so you can really help make a difference here to improving BI and bringing it more up to date!

  • Summary of Bush and Folger's Promise of Mediation - This one, about 1800 words long, is written just exactly as I suggest above — chapter-by-chapter, highlighting the key ideas and using what we call "accessible English."
  • Summary of Fitzduff's Beyond Violence - This one, about 1450 words long, does not break the book out by chapter, but it covers the main ideas in a readable and engaging way.
  • Summary of Susskind's Dealing with an Angry Public
  • Please see our current lists of book and article summaries.

Practitioner Interviews

Interviews should be recorded face to face in as quiet an environment as possible, using audio and/or video recording equipment. The files can be saved using any of the popular audio or video formats — mp3, mp4, Quicktime, etc. Interviewers should also transcribe the interviews, and save the transcriptions as a Word file. They should then send that file to the person interviewed to make sure they don't need to take out any names or other confidential information that the interviewee might later decide shouldn't be published. If you have audio or video editing software, we ask that you be sure that the audio and/or video is fixed appropriately. If you do not, let us know what needs to be changed and we can do that. Send us the audio, video, and/or transcriptions, and we will post them (assuming they are of sufficient quality).

User Guides and Checklists


We have not developed a standard style guide for user guides and checklists — indeed, that's why we have both, not one or the other. Both are designed to give people a manageable set of things to learn and think about with respect to a particular subtopic. We suggest potential writers look at the variety of user guides and checklists we now have, and loosely pattern what they do after one of those that seems to fit your purposes. Beyond that, the same style guidelines apply here as did to essays and case studies:

 

  • File Format: Submit your document in MS Word.
  • Document Formatting: Simple!!!
    • Bold, Italics, and Underlining is okay.
    • Numbered lists and Bulleted lists are okay.
    • First, Second, and Third Level headings are good — we like headings!
  • Language - English. Beyond that....
    • Jargon should be avoided if at all possible (people from many different backgrounds read these) and when it is absolutely necessary, all jargon should be explained.
    • All acronyms should be spelled out the first time.
    • Language should be accessible to people who are not native English speakers — keep it relatively simple.
    • Keep sentences structure relatively simple, sentences and paragraphs relatively short.
  • Tables - Use simple sans-serif fonts in tables — such as "arial". Make sure the table is readable at 770 pixels or less. (If the table looks readable on your screen in a space that is no wider than the text part of a BI essay in a browser zoomed to 100%, then you are fine.)
  • Graphics - You can use any graphic that can be rendered on the screen, as long as it is legible at a width of 770 pixels or less. (See above for guidance about how to tell.)
  • Links - put in with word, but also put in a Zotero/RIS file — preferably one file per essay or case study. Links to BI resources should be relative links, however. That means you can leave out the "http://www.beyondintractability.org" and just start with the / that comes after it.
  • Citations - Use Zotero to put your citations into word. Although you are probably more familiar with the APA citation style, its use of parenthetical in-text citations does not work well with our html formatting. Therefore, we ask that you use the Chicago style. You don't need to learn that though — use Zotero to put in both your endnotes (not footnotes please). To do this, use the Word for Windows plugin for Zotero (for PCs) or the Mac Word plugin for Zotero (for Macs). Then all you need to do is to click "add citation", choose Chicago style, endnote, and Zotero does the rest. It even creates the bibliography entry for you, too. Details about how to format citations in Zotero for BI are found here. Please follow these instructions carefully so we can maintain a unified look throughout the site!
  • Bibliography - Also use Zotero and MLA style.
  • Examples: Look at some of our User Guides for examples of formatting and language; citations and biblios have been converted to HTML format, but stick with Zotero and we will do the HTML-ing.